The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a communication system, a base station may have a set of antenna elements that is configured to have a highly directional main lobe along a predetermined direction and a predetermined main lobe width during a particular period of time. The base station may transmit directional radio frequency signals, or also referred to as a directional signal beam, using the main lobe of the set of antenna elements along the predetermined direction. Also, the base station may receive signals from a mobile terminal with an elevated antenna gain when using the main lobe along such a predetermined direction. In some applications, the base station may have multiple sets of antenna elements for transmitting multiple signal beams along respective predetermined directions, or may have one set of antenna elements for transmitting multiple signal beams, either simultaneously or in a time-division manner. A mobile terminal in the communication system may communicate with the base station by using one of the signal beams from the base station. The mobile terminal may choose or be instructed to stop using a current signal beam from a serving base station and switch to using another signal beam from the same base station or from a neighboring base station when the another signal beam has a better signal quality than the current signal beam.